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Thinking Outside the Education Box

That box consisting of an institutional classroom with desks and chairs facing forward towards 'the boss' is becoming obsolete. Let's not forget growing use and apparent need for the Resource Officers in the current sad school climate.

Thank goodness there are many young adults turning the school notion on its head. Old timers like me who see the educational freedom light at the end of the deep, dark tunnel will continue on too.

Last night I ran into a Forbes magazine video about David Karp, Tumblr creator. It made me smile as the interviewer, Jeff Bercovici, stumbled on the word dropout, turning the phrase to "you finished high school at home". Karp concurred, "I pretty much dropped out of high school. I was technically homeschooled for three years, which I have to be in New York to be legal."

He's 26 years young, the same age as Aaron Swartz. My 26 year old son introduced me to Tumblr. Carry on, 26 year olds and all you other creators of imaginative projects.

In the interview, besides reviewing his research showing homeschoolers have better learning prospects, David Karp expanded on his opportunities dropping out of public school. He gained new mentors – outside of the school – that were non- "stoners"-, along with an internship and job at 15 years of age.

It's exciting to see the new media (such as Tumblr) catch on and help our communities grow in education and innovation.

Update about another outside-the-box young man. Illinois homeschooler and advocate, Karen Hoogland, must be proud of her youngest son, Doug. His creativity was spotted by a start-up company and he got special treatment and a job!

Mr. Bisciglia got the idea to use the game as a recruiting tool after seeing the work of Doug Hoogland, who helped create a custom version of Portal 2 (called a mod in the gamer community) for a man who used it as a wedding proposal. Mr. Bisciglia estimates that half of the engineers at WibiData play Portal 2, which Valve encourages people to mod.

WibiData flew Mr. Hoogland to San Francisco to tour its offices and provided him with architectural renderings of the space so he could faithfully create a virtual version of it in the game.